Certain sports require the player to hit or strike a moving ball. Baseball and softball are the best known sports of this type. The batter is required to hit a pitched ball with an elongated bat. However, certain other sports, such as tennis or badminton, have similar skill requirements, i.e. a moving ball is struck by a racquet rather than a bat.
Certain machines are known which throw a ball at a batter standing some distance away, such as the batting machine known as The Casey. These batting machines are, in effect, mechanical pitchers. While they effectively simulate a thrown ball, they have a number of disadvantages which render them impractical for many applications. They are costly to purchase and bulky to transport. They require electricity to operate, and this is not always available at many locations, such as ball fields, where the device would often be used. In addition, the balls hit by the batter must be recovered or "shagged" for the machine to be refilled The machine is not suited for indoor use in a person's home.
Besides automated batting machines, batting skills are practiced using static "tees" which tee or hold the ball up above ground level. The batter stands next to the tee and attempts to strike the stationary ball held on the tee. Again, the balls must be continually shagged or recovered to allow practice to continue. This renders tees impractical for a single person to use since the task of recovering the balls quickly becomes tiresome. In addition, tees cannot generally be used indoors unless a net is positioned in front of the tee to catch the batted balls. Again, this it makes it impractical or inconvenient to use the device in restricted indoor spaces.
Thus, there is a need for a batting practice device which is simple and quick to install which is durable which may be easily adjusted, and which does not require shagging of batted balls. Most ball fields have numerous vertical posts or poles, i.e. the poles used as part of the backstop or the fence poles used in the chain link fences surrounding the fields. In addition many residential neighborhoods have similar poles. For example, there are poles supporting street signs, stop signs, etc. Thus a device which could be easily attached to a pole would be valuable and could be widely used if the ball were connected to it in a tethered manner.
Various batting practice devices comprise elongated arms attached to poles which suspend a ball from the arm in a tether type fashion. Such devices are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,976,040 to Bales and U.S. Pat. No. 4,793,612 to Hammond. In Hammond, the support arm is attached to a backboard having an elongated channel at its rear side for abutting against a post. U-shaped bolts pass around the post and through the backboard where wing nuts are tightened on each leg of the bolts to hold the device on the pole. Bales discloses using two radiator type clamping bands, i.e. clamping bands having overlapped ends and a screw tightener, which pass around the post and must be tightened to hold the device to the post.
The Hammond and Bales devices are relatively difficult and time consuming to mount. The Hammond device has to be held in place while the U-bolts are inserted from the back and the wing nuts tightened. This can be quite difficult for one person to do and, as a practical matter, may require two people. The Bales device requires one end of each clamping member to be removed from the threaded fastener to allow the clamping member to be looped around the post. Then, the clamping member has to be rethreaded back into the fastener and the fastener has to be tightened using a screw driver all while trying to hold the device in place at a selected height Again, this is very difficult for one person to do easily or properly. The same relatively cumber some procedures have to be followed to adjust the height of the device on the pole.
In addition, the Hammond and Bales devices both have relatively complicated systems for suspending the ball from the support arm. They both teach suspending the ball from rotary discs that are held on the end of the support arm by conventional nuts. These nuts have to be tightened using a wrench, and such wrenches may not always be at hand or be easily manipulable by a youngster who might be trying to in stall the device. In addition, if one desires to replace one ball with a ball of another type on the end of the support arm, the nut must be loosened every time a replacement is made and then retightened again. Hammond discloses using spring clips on the end of his rotary disc to engage an eyelet on the end of the ball supporting rope or cord to ease the task of changing balls. However, these spring clips can again be difficult for a youngster to unclip, especially if the device has been left outside and the clip has become corroded.